Virtual.ink Mobile - User Guide

Light-painting, in your pocket. Capture it live, refine an existing clip, or use your phone as a light source.

This guide covers the Virtual.ink mobile app for Android and iPhone: one app, three tools — Live, Refine, and Shine — plus the Home screen they share.

Light-painting is about revealing reality in a way our eyes can't see. Virtual.ink turns your camera (or your screen, or your video library) into a long-exposure light-painting tool.

Installation

Virtual.ink is a free download on the Google Play Store (Android) and the Apple App Store (iPhone). Search for "Virtual.ink".

The app works out of the box on Free. No account or sign-in is required. Upgrading to Basic or Pro is done from inside the app (see Plans).

Home Screen

The Home screen is where the app opens every time. :

Live

Realtime light-painting capture using your camera. What you see on screen while shooting — the accumulated light trails on top of the live camera feed — is exactly what gets recorded or saved.

How it works

1. Open Live from Home. Grant camera permission when prompted (only asked the first time, and only when you actually open Live).
2. Point the camera at a moving light source (an LED, a phone flashlight, sparklers, glow sticks, car light trails at night, etc.) in a dim environment.
3. Press the record button (bottom of the screen) to start capturing. Light trails accumulate on screen as brighter or moving points of light move through frame.
4. Press it again (or wait for the timer, if a duration is set) to stop. The video is saved automatically to your gallery.

Static bright objects generally don't keep re-painting — the effect is tuned to keep painting focused on moving light, not on things that are simply bright and sitting still (this can change depending on the Separation effect, see below).

Top toolbar

Five icons in the top-right corner open overlay panels. Tap an icon again, or tap anywhere outside the open panel, to close it.

Bottom controls

• Record / Stop (large circular button) — starts or stops video capture, or triggers a photo/long-exposure capture in Photo mode.
• Snapshot — while recording video, saves a still of the current accumulated frame without stopping the recording.
• Reset — instantly clears all accumulated light trails and starts fresh, without stopping recording.
• Pause / Resume — freezes new light from being painted (the existing trail stays on screen and keeps fading normally) without stopping the recording; press again to resume painting.
• Gallery — opens an in-app strip of your recent Virtual.ink photos and videos. "View All" opens your device's own gallery app filtered to the same folder.

Camera panel

• Camera — pick between available lenses (wide, ultra-wide, tele, front, etc. — whatever your device exposes).
• Capture — Video or Photo.
• Video/Photo Resolution — choose from the resolutions your camera and current plan support (see Plans for the resolution ceiling per tier).
• Mode — Auto or Manual sensor control (only shown if your camera supports manual controls).
• White Balance — Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent, or Incandescent.
• Exposure Compensation — in Auto mode, nudges exposure brighter or darker.
• Shutter / ISO / Focus — in Manual mode, direct control of shutter speed, ISO, and focus distance, where your device's camera exposes them.
• In Photo mode, a hint explains whether the current shot will be a real single-frame long exposure, a frame-stacked exposure, or (on supported devices) a RAW/DNG capture.

Settings panel

• Display — Fill or Fit, controlling how the camera preview is cropped/letterboxed to your screen.
• Save final snapshot — On/Off. When on, a still of the last accumulated frame is saved automatically the moment a recording stops.
• Countdown — 0, 2, 5, or 10 seconds before capture begins.
• Exposure Time (video mode's recording-duration slider) — sets how long a capture runs before automatically stopping. The maximum depends on your plan (see Plans); Pro has no cap.

Effects panel

All effects apply live and are baked into whatever you record or snapshot. A Reset all effects link at the bottom of this panel restores every control below to its default.

Decay and trails

• Decay Speed (0.25x–4.0x) — how quickly the light trail fades.
• Trail Length (1–60 s) — how long light generally stays visible before fully fading. Decay Speed and Trail Length work together: the effective fade time is Trail Length ÷ Decay Speed.
• Turbulence — adds organic, flowing distortion to the accumulated trail instead of a perfectly still one.
• Separation — how aggressively the app distinguishes "paint" (bright, moving light) from the rest of the scene.

Look

• Hue Shift (0–5) — rotates the color of the image/trail through the color wheel. Repeats seamlessly, so higher values just mean finer control over the shift amount.
• Hue Shift's Light Only toggle (shown once Hue Shift is above 0) restricts the color shift to just the painted light, leaving the rest of the scene untouched.
• Color Ramp — pick from a grid of 30 preset color palettes to remap the image's brightness into a custom color gradient (or leave the first swatch selected for no remap). Also has its own Light Only toggle.
• Chromatic Aberration (0–20) — splits the red/green/blue channels apart for a lens-fringing look.

Animate

• Animate — None, Zoom, or Gravity. Puts the accumulated trail in motion instead of leaving it static.
  • Zoom: trails grow or shrink toward Out or In.
  • Gravity: trails drift Up, Down, Left, Right, or in a Spiral.
• Animation Length (0.01–40) and Animation Speed (0.05–40) — shown once Animate isn't None; control how far and how fast the trail motion travels.

Transform

• Transform — None, Mirror, Kaleidoscope, Pinwheel, Mandala, or Tiling. Repeats/reflects the frame into symmetric patterns.
• Once a Transform mode is active, additional controls appear: Folds (2–24), Reflect Mode (Reflect vs Pinwheel), Sensor Coverage, Rotation (0–360°), Center X/Y, Spiral Twist (-180° to 180°), Hue per Fold (0–360°), Radial Zoom, Auto-Rotate Speed, Wobble Amount (with a Wobble Rate shown once Wobble is above 0), and a Light Only toggle.
• Tiling mode additionally exposes Tiles X and Tiles Y (1–8 each).

Sound panel

• Volume
• Riser, Countdown Tick, Countdown Drone, Capture Tick, Capture Drone, Success Chime — each an On/Off toggle for that audio cue.
• Metronome — sets the tick subdivision (1x, 2x, 4x, or 8x) during capture.

Controller panel

Connect a Bluetooth gamepad in your device's Bluetooth settings, then enable Bluetooth Gamepad here. Mapping:

Full-screen mode (Pro)

Pro unlocks a full-screen mode that hides all of Live's own on-screen controls, leaving just the unobstructed camera preview — useful for screen recording or casting the feed to another display. Tap anywhere on the empty preview to toggle it; toggling back off restores the chrome.

Free-plan watermark

On the Free plan, a Virtual.ink watermark is composited onto the live preview (so what you see while shooting matches what gets saved) and onto every saved photo and video. On Basic and Pro, there's no watermark.

Refine

Import a video you already have, trim it, and apply the same light-painting engine as Live to it after the fact — no camera needed, no re-shoot required.

How it works

1. Open Refine from Home and pick a video from your device's gallery.
2. Trim the clip to the section you want (the trim selection itself is capped at 3 minutes on every plan — see Global limits). The trimmed preview loops automatically. Tap Next… once you're happy with the selection.
3. On the Effects screen, the trimmed clip plays on loop with the light-painting effects live on top. Adjust effects, set the light-accumulation range, then Export.
4. The exported video is saved to your gallery (Movies/Virtual.ink).

Top toolbar

Three icons, top-right:

Tapping the logo, top-left, always returns to Home.

Light-accumulation range

Trails only build up inside a chosen in/out window of the clip; outside that window, the clip plays back normally (no accumulation). This lets you confine the light-painting effect to just the part of the clip where it matters. The window is capped at 60 seconds on every plan (see Global limits). A compact timeline is always visible at the bottom of the Effects screen showing where the current window sits and where playback currently is; tap the Range icon to open the full editor with drag handles.

Effects panel

Refine shares the same underlying effects engine as Live, with one Refine-specific control:

Painting mode

• Continuous or Decay — Continuous keeps painting essentially permanently within the accumulation range; Decay fades continuously at the Trail Length (1–30 s) rate, shown only in Decay mode.
• Fade out (0.5–10 s) — common to both modes: once playback exits the light-accumulation range, the existing trail fades out over this duration, then resets, ready to build again if playback re-enters the range (e.g. on the next loop).

Everything else — Turbulence, Separation, Hue Shift (+ Light Only), Color Ramp (+ Light Only), Chromatic Aberration, and Animate (Zoom/Gravity + direction + Animation Length/Speed) — behaves exactly as described under Live's Effects panel above.

Export

Export renders the trimmed clip once, in real time, with the effects and light-accumulation window baked in, then muxes the original clip's audio back in. Export resolution follows your plan's resolution ceiling (see Plans), scaled down from the source if needed (never scaled up). The saved file keeps the source's own portrait/landscape orientation.

Global limits

Two limits apply identically on every plan (Free, Basic, and Pro):

• Imported/trimmed clip length: 3 minutes.
• Light-accumulation range: 60 seconds.

Free-plan watermark

Same as Live: a Virtual.ink watermark is composited onto the Effects-screen preview and onto the exported video on Free. Basic and Pro have no watermark.

Shine

A minimal full-screen light source, for painting with your phone itself instead of pointing its camera at something else. Fully unlocked on every plan.

How it works

1. Open Shine from Home.
2. Press and hold anywhere on screen to turn the light on; release to turn it off. A hint ("Tap-hold to paint with light") shows until you first press.
3. Swipe left from the right edge to open the settings drawer.

Light source

• Screen — the entire screen lights up at full brightness while held (in your chosen color, see below).
• Flash — uses your device's built-in camera flash/torch LED instead of the screen. Disabled with an explanatory note if your device has no flash.

Settings drawer (swipe left to open)

• Light source — Screen or Flash, as above.
• Strobe — On/Off. When on:
  • Speed (2–18 flashes/sec)
  • Spacing (10–90%) — how much of each on/off cycle is spent lit; controls streak length and gap size in a long exposure.
• Color grid — 24 swatches (screen source only; Flash can't be tinted): white, 22 evenly spaced hues, and a live animated rainbow swatch.
• Reset — restores Screen source, strobe off, and the white swatch (does not touch the strobe speed/spacing sliders).

All of these settings are remembered the next time you open Shine.

Gallery

Photos and videos captured in Live, and videos exported from Refine, are saved to your device's standard media library:

• Photos: Pictures/Virtual.ink
• Videos: Movies/Virtual.ink

Live's in-app Gallery button shows a quick strip of your recent captures without leaving the app; "View All" hands off to your device's own gallery/photos app.

Plans

Virtual.ink is one app with three plans: Free, Basic, and Pro. Upgrade or downgrade anytime from the Home screen's plan section; downgrades take effect at the next renewal.

Two Refine limits (3-minute import, 60-second light range) apply to every plan equally — see Global limits.

Tips

• Shoot in a dim environment. Light-painting works best when the moving light source is clearly brighter than its surroundings.
• Use Reset in Live, or re-enter the light-accumulation range in Refine, to start a fresh trail without stopping/re-exporting.
• Try Separation if static bright objects are painting trails you don't want, or if a dim moving light isn't painting enough.
• Combine Color Ramp + Light Only to recolor just the painted trail while keeping the rest of the scene natural.
• Use Animate (Zoom or Gravity) to give an otherwise static trail motion.
• On Refine, keep the light-accumulation range tight around just the part of the clip with the light performance — trails outside it don't build up, keeping the rest of the clip clean.
• Pair a Bluetooth gamepad in Live for hands-free record/reset/pause control while you're the one holding the light source.
• Full-screen mode (Pro, Live) is ideal when casting or screen-recording the viewfinder itself.